Scientists are now 95% confident that 2026 will be the hottest year in recorded history, according to Berkeley Earth, the independent US climate research group, which delivered its forecast to BBC News as world leaders gathered in Antalya, Turkey, for the opening of COP31 on November 9.
With two months of the year still remaining, the planet has already surpassed the conditions that made 2024 the previous record holder, driven by the compounding effects of long-term climate change and an unusually powerful El Niño event. For an insurance industry already managing a sharp rise in climate-driven losses, the confirmation of a new record is less a distant warning than a live underwriting problem.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) published its own State of the Global Climate Update for COP31 on the same day, taking a more cautious position than Berkeley Earth but still placing 2026 among the four warmest years on record. Its Secretary-General, Celeste Saulo, said the findings “give new meaning to the phrase off the charts,” in a statement accompanying the report.
The WMO also projected that 2027 will bring no relief, with the El Niño expected to persist into next year. El Niño does not generate new heat, Saulo said, but amplifies it by releasing accumulated heat stored in record-temperature oceans.
According to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC), insurers initiated just over two million homeowner policy non-renewals in the US in 2024, a 61% increase from the year before. Non-renewal rates rose in every NAIC region between 2018 and 2024, by between 96% and 216%, with the West recording the highest non-renewal rate at 25.1 per 1,000 policies in 2024, followed by the Southeast.
A September 2026 paper by NYU Stern professors Mary Billings and Stephen Ryan, examining the downstream effects of climate-driven non-renewals on local economies, found that a one-percentage-point rise in non-renewals is associated with a 0.91-percentage-point increase in the foreclosure rate, a chain of financial stress that moves well beyond the insurance transaction itself.
Swiss Re Institute’s Sigma 1/2026 report found that insured losses from natural catastrophes are rising between 5% and 7% annually in real terms, as the growing gap between insured and uninsured climate losses continues to widen.
Allianz has said publicly that climate change keeps adding to the list of assets that are becoming uninsurable. ClimateWise, a Cambridge University-linked network, put a finer point on it in a March 2026 briefing, describing insurability as “one of the earliest signals of whether assets, sectors, and entire economies can survive the accelerating impacts of physical climate risk.” That dynamic is already visible in reinsurance pricing, carrier appetite, and the terms available to clients in exposed markets.
Robert Rohde, chief scientist at Berkeley Earth, told the BBC that the current run of record temperatures is “what we expect as global warming progresses,” and warned that “there is potential for much larger and much more dramatic changes down the line.”
The world is currently on track for approximately 2.8 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels by 2100, according to UNEP’s Emissions Gap Report, well above the 1.5-degree threshold set under the Paris Agreement.
Tom Mortlock, head of climate analytics for Asia Pacific at Aon in Sydney, has said that across multiple markets, “climate change is now a practical, near-term issue for insurers and reinsurers, not just a long-term topic,” with repricing pressure building across deductibles, sublimits, aggregates, and attachments even in markets that may still appear relatively soft. That dynamic shifts the intermediary’s role: a broker who can combine historical loss data with forward-looking climate analytics is better positioned than one arguing from past claims alone.
Against that backdrop, the insurance industry has its own seat at the table in Antalya. The United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP FI) and the Insurance Association of Türkiye (TSB) are co-hosting the COP31 Global Sustainable Insurance Summit on November 13 and 14, with the stated theme of “harnessing the insurance industry’s capabilities to catalyze resilience across the economy.”
The agenda covers the protection gap, public-private risk sharing, catastrophe financing, and the insurability of renewable energy assets. Those are areas where the industry’s role is shifting from passive loss-absorber to active participant in risk architecture.
The protection gap remains the central challenge. Globally, only about 43% of weather-related damages are insured, leaving an annual shortfall of roughly US$132 billion, according to research by Oliver Wyman published in partnership with Marsh McLennan. In developing markets, more than 90% of climate-related losses go uninsured, according to UNEP. Even in Europe, only 20% of catastrophe losses are insured, according to UNEP Finance Initiative data presented ahead of COP31.
Climate change as an insurance problem is no longer in dispute at Antalya. The question now is whether the industry can help close the protection gap before that gap closes off its ability to operate in the most exposed markets. Brokers working with clients in coastal, flood-prone, or wildfire-adjacent locations are navigating the growing difficulty of placing property coverage in climate-stressed regions, where carrier appetite is contracting faster than alternative capacity is emerging.
The El Niño underpinning much of 2026’s heat is not expected to ease before the summit concludes. The WMO has confirmed near-100% certainty that the event will persist through the duration of COP31 and into February 2027. That means the weather driving the claims will not pause while negotiators debate the response.
What COP31 will deliver in concrete terms remains uncertain. Divisions between nations on electrification targets, climate finance, and the role of natural gas have resurfaced in early negotiations. But the industry’s presence in Antalya signals something the data has been showing for several years: that the insurance industry’s response to climate risk is no longer a reputational exercise. It is a solvency question.
